Unlike most of the dramas you see on TV these days, this was not written in a “writers’ room” at a studio in Hollywood or Burbank. This was written down somewhere in the United States of America. About two months ago, I got a call from my very small bank in West Hollywood. It’s a tiny bank and I was literally their first customer when they opened in late 1978 or early 1979. The young woman on the other end of the line told me that they had some problems with quite a large number of checks that had come in for payment. (READ MORE from Ben Stein: Indispensable Lessons From My Life) The problem, in a few words, was that someone or someones had apparently stolen a large number of blank checks from the home of my wife and me in Beverly Hills. That person, or someone connected with that person, had forged my signature and then successfully attempted to cash the checks or use them to buy items or services. I drove over to the bank and studied a good-sized pile of checks with what were clearly forgeries. Some of the forgeries were sadly obvious and of poor quality. I had an idea of who the forger was almost instantly. He or she was a close friend of some 10 years standing. She had, at one point, lived quite near our house in Trancas, a neighborhood in far north-western Malibu. I knew the neighborhood from the “get-go” of my many years in Hollywood because my friends and idols, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, great writers and great friends, lived on a cliff there overlooking the Pacific. They had been kind and invited me over for social events and just to talk. The suspected forger lived near there. She had various serious life problems. Our bank worked diligently to make sure that the accounts were made whole. And it was in that labyrinth that the problems rested for some time. Many years later after I first came, my wife and I bought a modest home there in nowhere near as prestigious a spot as the Dunnes’ home but still in a lovely spot overlooking the waves. By the beginning of this year, my wife and I had gone through several trials. Our 37-year-old son had died in a ghastly firearms tragedy. My wife had health problems that kept her from leaving Beverly Hills and coming to Malibu. I still went out there with friends and caregivers whom I needed because a poorly done orthopedic surgery had left me virtually immobilized. Still, I loved that house and went there whenever I could. Roughly two weeks ago I made arrangements to meet a dear friend, a middle-aged woman whose husband had recently died of pancreatic cancer. She went ahead of my little party. She arrived ahead of me and when we got there she was already there. She had discovered that someone or someones had unlawfully entered our home. It had been badly ransacked with many TVs, computers, and stereos strewn around the first floor and our basement. There was also a mess of souvenirs of my life and my wife’s life missing from where they had been for literally decades. I was especially upset that several drawers of correspondence between Mr. Richard Nixon and me and my father were missing. My helpful friends and I scoured the house. We also called the “Malibu-Lost Hills” Sheriff’s station. In slightly less than half an hour, a pleasant, cheerful sheriff’s deputy in a leather jacket appeared at the door. He had some alarming suggestions. The main one was that there were some signs that persons unknown were trying to “squat” in our house. In California, housebreakers could break into our house. Set up housekeeping even for a very short time, and then it was a long, painful, expensive ordeal to go into court here to get them out. In the meantime, my wife and I were deprived of the use of our home. Who knew what kind of mischief and vandalism could go on there? And what kind of maniac would want armloads of correspondence between Richard Nixon, post-1974, and me and my father, Herbert Stein? It is all deeply upsetting. As far as I know, there have been no crimes of this kind in our neighborhood — ever. And, again, who wants all of those letters from Richard Nixon at this stage? I already know Carl Bernstein very well and there’s nothing in my possession he would want or need. Too much like the beginning of a detective story. I don’t like it. The post Squatters in Northern Malibu appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Police across the U.S. fear a long period of mayhem and bloodshed. The magnitude of recent unstoppable campus riots and urban protests while we await the fall semester and the outcome of the 2024 presidential election in November, has reminded Americans that we are likely one BLM-type scenario from another explosion of race-fueled violence and chaos. For starters, Congress still has no answers for why the Capitol Police had no standby reaction force on Jan. 6, despite significant intelligence that various radical groups would congregate that day in Washington D.C. The Capitol Police and trained military police units with riot control tear gas should have been prepared to disperse any crowd approaching the Capitol steps. (READ MORE: Don’t Dismiss the Trump Assassination Attempt) Additionally, following May 2020’s police-involved murder of George Floyd and the ensuing “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests, government officials allowed BLM rioters from various groups to destroy significant portions of Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, Seattle, and many other cities.  Letting this mayhem continue, night after night, proved to be a monumental and needless mistake. Today’s policymakers can learn a great deal from previous presidents of the United States and how they handled such situations, in several of which I was a participant. Below are the steps that government officials should take immediately to prepare for likely national nightmares, based, in part, on my experience with the socio-political upheavals of the 1960s. Active Military Forces Prevent Protesting Crowds From Turning Into Mobs During the riot-prone 1960s, after completing three years as an airborne infantryman in Germany during the Berlin Crisis, the Army changed my branch to Military Police and sent me to a six-week training course in riot control at Fort Gordon, Georgia. That was followed by an assignment to (then) Fort Bragg, N.C., the 503rd MP Battalion whose 750 soldiers’ main training was riot control. In October 1962, the company I would soon command had just returned from President John F. Kennedy’s deployment to assist the legendary James Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi. Our company of MPs marched through a cordon of fire to calm that campus. The following May the same company, with me in command, was in the lead aircraft that JFK dispatched to squelch the Birmingham riots. Our full MP active-duty battalion trained in riot control and remained in Alabama for two weeks before returning to Fort Bragg. The unit’s mere presence deterred future disturbances in Birmingham. During the entire summer of 1964, the same MP battalion provided the city of Charlotte, N.C.’s police department with a week-long riot control course for which I was chief instructor. Each police officer learned when a crowd becomes a mob, and the important priorities of force to stop and control any disturbance. (READ MORE: Tim Walz, Unreformed Summer Soldier) At the end of each week, our entire 750-man battalion staged a realistic demonstration in our “Combat in Cities” training area of an actual crowd in civilian clothes, carrying signs, as it turned into a mob. MPs would appear on the scene, employing the priorities of force sequence: soldiers slowly advancing with pointed bayonets, proclaiming via loudspeaker that the mob must disperse, and soaking the mob members with fire-truck-mounted water cannons. Next, they employed tear gas from backpack riot control agents and baseball-type grenades that explode (using white powder for training). Finally, we displayed our last priority of force: Rooftop sharpshooters with weapons to neutralize any rioters perpetrating serious crimes. In 1965, two weeks after the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge incident, in which the legendary John Lewis was hospitalized by police brutality, President Lyndon Johnson ordered two active-duty MP Battalions, one from Texas and my unit from North Carolina, to protect civil-rights marchers on their trek from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led this procession. There were absolutely no incidents during that peaceful march, thanks to the involvement of these two trained active MP battalions, backed up by Selma’s and Montgomery’s police forces. None of these troops, including myself, will ever forget the protest’s climax: Thousands of peaceful Americans applauding MLK’s magnificent speech in front of Alabama’s State Capitol. From 1980 to 1983 I was assigned a key planning position with the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and spent numerous hours working closely with the chairman and his service chiefs of staff. I believe all four chiefs and the JCS planners understood the President’s power and duty to deploy active military forces to overcome any disturbance that police or other civilian authorities, including governors, were incapable of controlling. Unfortunately, our current military leaders do not seem to agree. In April 1968, while assigned to the Pentagon, I participated in President Johnson’s order to quash the riots that erupted in Washington, D.C. the day after MLK’s assassination. Units from the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg arrived in D.C. the morning after that tragedy. Almost 14,000 federal troops and National Guardsmen suppressed the four-day riot, the largest disturbance in D.C. since the Civil War. Today’s Law Enforcement Is Woefully Unprepared to Handle Riots Today’s preparations for our police forces and National Guard units appear inadequate for two reasons. First, 2020’s George Floyd-related carnage and the pro-Palestine actions on college campuses and elsewhere since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre in Israel have occurred more than a half-century since America faced unrelenting violent protests. The relative domestic tranquility between 1970 and 2020 decreased the need for and existence of riot-control expertise.  Thus, in recent years, both police and National Guard units that were ordered to quell riots have been ineffective. They have often stood still for hours or days, even when rioters hurled rocks and cement-filled bottles at them. Many appear untrained in proper curfew and dispersal techniques. This lack of skill has meant greater danger for these uninformed personnel and disastrous pillage for citizens. (READ MORE: Tim Walz’s Message on Murdering Babies: ‘Mind Your Own Damn Business’) Beginning with George Floyd’s death and subsequent disruptions, officials from coast to coast let radicals riot night after night for months. Throughout that carnage, civilian and military leaders should have urged President Donald Trump to follow the examples of Presidents Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and even George Washington, who personally put down the Whiskey Rebellion. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, President Trump received few, if any recommendations. Rather, he was excoriated and called a fascist dictator simply for suggesting that he might order the active military to protect cities from rioters, as 12 former presidents have done on 19 separate occasions, via their powers under 10 U.S.C. §§ 331-335, the Insurrection Act of 1807. The moment a crowd becomes a mob, forces must take timely and appropriate action to protect lives, private property, and public facilities in every American jurisdiction. The active-duty military police must be called in by our president when necessary. Had the Trump and Biden-Harris administrations followed these historical examples, the George Floyd riots and the Jan. 6 disaster might not have occurred. Likewise, the recent pro-Hamas destruction in our cities might have been squelched swiftly or never even launched. Today’s federal government would be wise to learn from the past and prepare itself against the next orgy of burning, looting, beating, and killing. Presidents of the United States must never again fail to request active Army riot control forces to quell political violence across this land. America’s active military police battalions must be trained and used when necessary.     Colonel Joseph V. Rafferty served as Post Commander of the Presidio of San Francisco. Manhattan-based Fox News political commentator Deroy Murdock contributed to this opinion piece. The post America Must Be Ready for the Next Round of Riots appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

X welcomed back former president Donald Trump on the platform after CEO Elon Musk hosted an interview with Trump on Monday.  Since its release, the interview has been listened to over 26 million times. It covers a variety of topics, from the attempted Trump shooting, the border crisis, and the economy, to Trump’s thoughts on the upcoming presidential election. (READ MORE: Don’t Dismiss the Trump Assassination Attempt) The European Union sent a letter to Musk, warning X to comply with the EU’s Digital Service Act. “Formal proceedings are already ongoing against X under the DSA, notably linked to the dissemination of illegal content and the effectiveness of the measures taken to combat disinformation,” EU Chairman Thierry Breton wrote. Musk responded to Breton on X, stating that he would “NEVER do something so rude & irresponsible,” attached to a meme referencing Tropic Thunder.  Prefacing the interview, Musk attributed the 35-minute delay to a DDOS attack, a cyber attack that occurs when fake traffic floods the site and prevents users from entering the webpage. “As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition as to what president Donald Trump has to say,” Musk said.  Throughout the interview, Trump and Musk discussed Trump surviving the attempted shooting last month and criticized the Biden-Harris administration on their handling of a variety of issues, such as foreign policy and the economy. Poking at Harris’ absence in front of the media since announcing her campaign with Walz, Trump stated, “Kamala wouldn’t have this conversation because she’s not as smart.”  The Left and mainstream media outlets criticized the interview. Harris’ campaign criticized the interview, stating that Trump’s campaign serves “self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class,” despite Musk offering Harris time on X Spaces as well. A USA Today headline called the interview an “unmitigated disaster,” and the New York Times headline described the chat as a “two-hour ramble.” (READ MORE: What Happened to All the Polling?) After the interview, the United Auto Workers union filed federal labor charges against Musk and Trump for their comments on workers who go on strike. Trump discussed the possibility of a role for Musk in his next administration, and Trump praised Musk for how he handled strikes by automatically firing them. The charges claim that Trump and Musk had gone against protected rights to organize against a company by “suggesting he would fire employees engaged in protected concerted activity, including striking.” Trump’s campaign responded to the union, calling them “Democrat special interest bosses” whose lawsuit “is a shameless political stunt intended to erode President Trump’s overwhelming support among America’s workers.”  Trump’s first post since returning to X read, “Are you better off now than you were when I was president? Our economy is shattered. Our border has been erased. We’re a nation in decline. Make the American Dream AFFORDABLE again. Make America SAFE again. Make America GREAT Again!” Trump was originally barred from the platform’s former owners in 2021, after being accused of inciting violence attributed to the Jan. 6 events. Musk reinstated Trump’s account in 2022 via a poll asking X users if his account should be restored. (READ MORE: Tim Walz, Unreformed Summer Soldier) In recent weeks, Trump has made appearances with other notable figures besides Musk. Trump has appeared on Logan Paul’s podcast Impaulsive, and streamed with influencer Adin Ross. The post Trump’s Return to X appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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